TABLE 8.1 Conceptions of Modernity: Essential Processes As Viewed by Major Contributors

150 After Parsons

TABLE 8.1 Conceptions of Modernity: Essential Processes as Viewed by Major Contributors

Differentiation

Social- Functional Individual Uniﬁcation Equalization Disciplining Rationalization

Locus Smith, Simmel, On Tocqueville, Tocqueville, Weber, Comte, classicus Wealth of Social Dif- Ancien Democracy Protestant Positive Nations ferentiation Régime in America Ethic Philosophy Other Comte Durkheim Comte Hegel Freud Hegel, Weber contributors Spencer Thomas Elias Durkheim Mannheim Simmel Durkheim Redﬁeld Geertz Weber Elias Mannheim Marx Eisenstadt Bendix Ortega y Bendix Riesman Apter Gasset Gorski Black Marshall Bell

Source: Author’s compilation.

Modernity as Functional Specialization

Theorists of modernity have used the notion of differentiation at least three different ways. Ini- tially it connoted the division of labor in production and exchange. Later it came to signify the separation of different institutional sectors or spheres of action from one another. In addition it came to designate the process whereby individuals become increasingly distinct and unlike one another, called “individuation” (discussed in a later section). The division of labor figures as perhaps the most frequently defined marker of the modern order. Adam Smith, arguably the founding father of modernity theory, centered it in the char- acteristics of what he called commercial society. These properties were twofold: a remarkable improvement in the dexterity of productive labor, and the extension of opportunities to exchange the products of that labor through a monetarized market. Behind all this was an extended process of division of labor. Specialization in production was not planned, but evolved spontaneously as individual producers came to see the benefit of exploiting an advantageous position, however it was attained, in a system of exchange. The idea of the division of labor was developed more or less continuously by the major theorists of modernity. Comte analyzed ways in which the division of labor promotes coopera- tive endeavors and societal stability, and considered the division of labor in the sciences as well as in industry.6 Marx advanced the analysis by distinguishing between the division of labor in society at large, which he described as arising spontaneously through a series of historical stages, and division of labor in the industrial workplace, which he saw as centrally planned and forcibly instituted for the sake of competitive advantage. Spencer generalized the concept into a cosmic process of increasing complexification, from incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogene- ity. Standing nimbly on Smith’s shoulders, Spencer celebrated the growth of functional specialization in the modern economy and extended its scope to include the differentiation of political and ecclesiastical structures. Durkheim famously focused on the division of labor in his first major monograph, extending Comte’s notions about the solidaristic effects of functional specialization. In this century, most theorists of modernization have included some reference to functional specialization as a key principle of the modern socioeconomic order. In our own time, Niklas Luhmann has insisted that functional differentiation must serve as the master concept for Modernity 155

TABLE 8.2 The “Revolutions” and the Beneﬁts of Modernity

Differentiation

Social- Cultural Key Process Functional Individual Uniﬁcationa Equalizationa Disciplining Rationalization

Associated Industrial Integrative Social Disciplinary Academic revolution Revolution revolution revolution revolution revolution (Geertz) (Fararo) (Gorski) (Jencks and Riesman) Adaptive Goods and Freedom Collective Justice Civility Knowledge beneﬁts services efﬁcacy

Source: Author’s compilation. aWhat is often called the democratic revolution consists of a combination of both of these processes.

arts, sciences, technology, and standard of living, though he denied that any of these benefits possessed a moral nature. The benefits of political unification were also hailed by a number of theorists of modernity. These included pacification of territories under the command of a single regime, the ability to mobilize citizenries to combat disasters from nature or attacks from outside powers, and the provision of greater benefits to all within its boundaries. The movement toward hegemony of universalistic norms has had many benefits. Among these benefits Tocqueville included the accessibility of primary education to all, the enhanced productivity that comes from the promise of mobility, the diminution of warlike passions from eliminating stratification based on honor, and the toleration of diverse religions. As Durkheim foresaw, securing the rights of previously disadvantaged groups has promoted social harmony. Equalization under the law led to a more contented populace as well as to a sense of living in a more just society. Despite his misgivings about equalization, Ortega y Gasset observed that extending rights and resources to more of the population was a change that promoted vital energies and vastly increased human possibilities. The benefits of discipline included the capacity of citizens to live together in a civil manner as well as the ability to perform occupational tasks on a regular and reliable basis. Many authors (Weber, Mannheim, Bendix, Philip Gorski) have found modern industrial labor and bureau- cratic work to be dependent on new levels of self-discipline. Elias has found this essential for people to get along in situations of dense interaction, and Freud considered such self-control generically important for the achievements of civilization. Others, however, have found the new levels of self-control to be intrinsically valuable; thus, Weber considered the formation of gen- uine personality through ethical regulation of daily conduct to be a beneficial outcome of the spirit that ushered in the era of modern capitalism (Hennis 1988). The benefits of rationalized culture are similarly both instrumental and intrinsically valuable. From the Enlightenment onward, the enlargement of a knowledge base has been hailed as a crucial resource for enhancing human well-being. This includes both the development of bodies of codified knowledge and the spread of techniques for improved cognition. Modern consumers came to expect continuous improvements in commodities of all sorts thanks to new kinds of validated knowledge. Beyond that, the very existence of bodies of works rep- resenting an uninhibited quest for truth has been taken as a key feature of civilization (White- head 1933). 156 After Parsons

The Discontents of Modernity

From the onset of the modernizing revolutions, a host of discontents have been associated with the division of labor and its effects in the modern occupational and market systems (see table 8.3). Intense specialization in industrial production elicited critiques about the dehumanizing consequences of such work. Repetition of simple operations was said to make workers “as stu- pid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” and the dexterity thus acquired to come “at the expense of [a person’s] intellectual, social, and martial virtues.” The hegemony of commerce created a society in which, as Smith further put it, “every man . . . becomes in some measure a merchant”—with the attendant calculating, proﬁt-oriented habits of mind (Smith 1776/1976, volume 2, 303; volume 1, 26).9 The monetarization of exchange, in Sim- mel’s analysis, has led to the reduction of all personal and aesthetic values to cash values and the conversion of what was original a means into an absolute end. Proliferation of consumable products elevated consumerism to a dominant place in life. The economic system that lay behind all these developments was faulted by Marx and his followers for a number of noxious effects. These include a base line of chronic unemployment, the instability of cyclical booms and busts in the economy, growing inequality between the top and bottom levels of the income hierarchy, and fragmentation of the community into a plethora of narrow economic interests. Individuation has also been associated with a number of modern ills, including swollen suicide rates (Durkheim), increased loneliness and anxiety (Slater 1976), and reduced public engagement (Sennett 1998) and social capital (Putnam 2000). Drawing together certain strands of this type of analysis, Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt (1969) scrutinized common psychological reactions to the individual’s emancipation from traditional, hierarchical authority. In particular, they argue, for most of human history “the mod- els for ego endeavor did not include autonomous initiative, and for centuries there were no systematic demands for personal and social autonomy” (Weinstein and Platt 1969, 197). The uniquely modern wish to be free has generated a good deal of guilt and anxiety, leading to regressive solutions that take violent forms; these include the revolutionary imposition of new values in excessive and polarized fashion, and the radical enforcement of a return to traditional values (1969, 38–42). Transformations associated with political democratization entailed other disadvantages. Enfranchisement of the masses led to less informed policy decisions. It caused vulnerability to

TABLE 8.3 The Modern Revolutions and their Associated Discontents

Differentiation

Social- Cultural Process Functional Individual Uniﬁcation Equalization Disciplining Rationalization

Revolution Industrial Integrative Social Disciplinary Academic Benefits Commerce Efficacy Justice Civility Knowledge Associated Hyper- Personal Repressive Support for Psychic “Tragedy of discontents speciali- malaise; centraliza- mediocrity; repression culture”; zation; social tion; vio- erosion of Jacobin alienation; deficits lence standards barbarities consumerism

Source: Author’s compilation. 158 After Parsons

TALCOTT PARSONS AND THE ANATOMY OF MODERNITY

In assessing the work of Talcott Parsons (or any other major thinker), it is important always to hold in mind the distinction that Jeffrey Alexander drew long ago (1983) between what can be done within Parsons’s theoretical system and what the author himself has done with it. Although Parsons himself did not identify all of the features and benefits of modernity that we have sur- veyed thus far, nor did he treat many of its discontents extensively, if at all, his conceptual framework enables us to classify, interpret, and relate a great number, if not all, of them. It does so by employing the master notion of functional differentiation among action systems. The Parsonian framework conceives of action as behavior filled with meaning, which is derived from a synthe- sis of biological and psychological impulses with social expectations and cultural values. Parsons analyzes the universe of action as organized in boundary-maintaining systems that vary inde- pendently but that admit mutual interpenetration. In the course of human evolution, these systems become differentiated from one another functionally along two dimensions (see table 8.4). The first dimension concerns the different levels of action systems. Over time, systems of cultural symbolism became independent of the systems of social roles that bore them (objecti- fication), and personalities became independent of the social roles in which they had been encompassed (individuation). These appear on a cybernetic hierarchy, upward from high energy potentials and downward from high control potentials. From top down, the systems are called cultural, social, psychological, and behavioral, or mind.10 The differentiation of each of these subsytems of the general universe of action yields a particular evolutionary outcome. Below the level of mind are the systems that do not partake of action—the biological organism of humans, and the other biological and physical environments. Above culture is what Parsons calls the environment of ultimate meanings. The second, horizontal dimension refers to subsystems devoted to the performance of particular functions: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and pattern maintenance. The subsystems of primary interest to theorists of modernity are at the social-system level, consisting of the economy, or adaptive subsystem (A); the polity, or goal-attainment subsystem (G); the societal community, or integrative subsystem (I); and the fiduciary subsystem (latent) pattern- maintenance subsystem (L). As these levels and subsystems of action came increasingly to separate from one another, they became organized by distinct boundaries, within which homeostatic and self-generating processes were active. In the earliest times, for example, personal identities were encompassed within social roles, which in turn were defined in terms set by the culture. Economic, political,

TABLE 8.4 The Organization of Action Systems

Action System (Evolutionary Variable) Functional Subsystems

L: Cultural system (value generalization) Constitutive symbolism Normative codes Science Art I: Social system (inclusion) Fiduciary systems (l) Societal community (i) Economy (a) Polity (g) G: Personality system (individuation) Personal identity (ego ideal) Conscience (superego) Reality orientation (ego) Motivational resources (id) A: Behavioral system (mind) (adaptive upgrading) Genetic base Affective capacity Implementive capacity Cognitive capacity

Source: Author’s compilation. Modernity 159 integrative, and ﬁduciary functions alike were performed by kinship groups. These groups also knew and transmitted the whole repertoire of cultural symbolism, constituted by the com- monsense culture of the group, without specialized subsystems of symbols. Table 8.5 suggests a way to relate the central processes, beneﬁts, and discontents of modernity already noted to concepts from the action theory framework.

Discontents Speciﬁc to Each Process of Systemic Differentiation

In an exceptionally creative adaptation of the action-theoretic schema, Frank Lechner (1985) points to the multiple sources of tension that the very process of systemic differentiation itself engenders. He lays out a paradigm of discontents that inhere in the central processes of socio- cultural evolution, the processes that Parsons refers to as value generalization, inclusion, individuation, and adaptive upgrading. The process of value generalization involves the extension of overarching beliefs to include a greater number of constituents by couching values at a higher level of abstraction. This implies that the bounds of any tradition have been loosened and that greater reﬂexivity is needed to interpret and implement values. As the value framework thereby becomes more distant and less directly meaningful, its utility in directing action becomes attenuated. The main source of com- pensation for the biological understeering of action becomes weakened and people may come to suffer from “cultural understeering.” The evolutionary variable of inclusion involves the extension of solidarity beyond parochial bounds such that those formerly considered strangers are included and a feeling of solidarity stretches beyond the primordial limits. With this loosening of the communal boundaries, the solidarity framework can be experienced as more distant, impersonal, and less binding. With the relativization of old bonds, individuals may suffer from a lack of solidarity, as Comte and Durkheim long ago indicated. Lechner’s treatment of the process of individuation focuses on the loosened bounds of personal biographies. This means that much more effort is required to mobilize the resources needed for personal identity and that the attainment of a coherent self becomes problematic.

TABLE 8.5 The Hallmarks of Modernity in Action-Theoretic Terms

Differentiation

Modernizing Social- Cultural Process Individual Functional Uniﬁcation Equalization Disciplining Rationalization

System Personality Social Social Social system Social system Cultural function different system system (I): jural (L): systems from (A): eco- (G): polity community “schooling” different social nomy from social systems systems Benefits Personal Commerce Efficacy Justice Civility Knowledge freedom Associated Personal Hyper- Repressive Support for Psychic “Tragedy of discontents malaise; specializa- centraliza- mediocrity; repression culture”; social tion; alien- tion; erosion of Jacobin deficits ation; con- violence standards barbarities sumerism

Source: Author’s compilation. 198 After Parsons

FIGURE 10.1 Anselm Kiefer, Shulamite, 1983

Source: Rosenthal (1987, 118), reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. the way offered by that work; it will not reduce the work to a reflex of the viewer’s own ego- centric needs, or judge it according to moral evaluative criteria appropriate to other modes of action or expression. The capacity to produce such interpretations is a restricted one, particu- larly in relation to works of art produced in an autonomous art world and thus more directly oriented to art as such than to mundane contexts of practical interaction. A good example of the different cognitive character of adequate and inadequate interpretations can be offered by critical responses to Anselm Kiefer’s monumental oil-based paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, for example Shulamite (fig. 10.1). This painting is based on a 1939 design by Wilhelm Kreis, for the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers, in the Hall of Soldiers, Berlin (fig. 10.2). Viewers and critics whose interpretations are based on single elements in the painting understand it in rather simple nationalistic terms. Some are shocked by the choice of Nazi monuments and symbols in the iconographic content, which they regard as a disturbing, because almost fascist, affirmation of some essential German identity. Others focus on the use of burnt materials as the medium for the painting, which they suggest symbolizes the cremation of a dead past (the Nazi era that can now be forgotten), from which the ashes of a new German painting can arise. More adequate criticism is able to integrate the discrete elements of such paintings with each other in a more systematic way, and to place them in the context both of history and the history of representation, as Andreas Huyssen (1989) has done. Huyssen shows how in Shulamite the monumental architecture of the Nazi past is transformed into a memorial for victims of the Holocaust: a ghastly brick oven, black from the smoke of cremation, lit at the end by a memorial candelabra with seven diminutive flames. Kiefer’s painting not only trans- forms its antecedent but also questions the whole language of monumental memorialization, combining as it does monumental scale and central-vanishing-point perspective (avoided in modernism) with base and transitory materials (straw, ashes, burned wood). On the basis of this more adequate critical response, the very process of interpreting the painting involves the Rationalists, Fetishists, and Art Lovers 199

FIGURE 10.2 Wilhelm Kreis, Design for Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers, in the Hall of the Soldiers, Berlin, 1939

Source: Huyssen (1989, 42). viewer in an exploration of the difficulty of constructing a way of constructing—a set of expressive forms—adequate to both the historical and the art-historical legacy of fascism. Ex- ploring fascism in art involves feelings of fascinated attraction at the same time as horrified re- vulsion; aesthetics cannot sublimate the terror of the past, since it is partly constitutive of it. The depth of the problem explored by Kiefer in terms of relationships to artistic materials, historical experience, and a whole range of representational means that were both internal to the experience of fascist terror and comprise a part of the representational tradition within which Kiefer found himself and which he sought to work through—all these could be articu- lated with each other to form a coherent expressive statement only by virtue of a highly abstract set of aesthetic operations. They require a correspondingly sophisticated set of transformational operations on the part of the critic, first to understand the painting and then to translate it into the simplified paraphrase that allows others without such competencies to see something of what Kiefer is doing and understand why it is so artistically powerful. Critical competence and its use in the contexts of museums and galleries affords viewers the opportunity to explore the expressive-affective meaning of certain aspects of their social and cultural milieu and their experience of it in a highly individuated and autonomous way. Such viewing is much more individuated and autonomous than an act of worship involving religiously prescribed expressive acts, like the performance of a mass and ritual obeisance before an icon of Christ and Mary. In these cases, obligatory affective investments on the part of the viewer are evoked and re- inforced. Abstraction of the practice of art interpretation from such concrete prescriptive norms permits a more individuated exploration on the part of a viewer of the potential significance of the expressive orientations objectified in a work of art, while the critical tools at his disposal permit a high level of reflexivity, both in observing his own response and in being self-consciously aware about exactly which dimensions of the work of art cause him to respond in particular ways. The commitment to a “love of art” and the mandate for a feelingful response maximize the affective openness of the viewer to the potential expressive significance of the principles Rationalists, Fetishists, and Art Lovers 201

FIGURE 10.3 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982

Source: Uncredited photograph, published in Art Forum,April 1983. to affectively think through and come to terms with the trauma that the war inflicted on the whole society. The focus of the monument on the individual offers a means to transcend some of the social divisions and offered a vehicle for shared mourning, even for those who could in no way identify with the collective violence that may seem to be affirmed in more conventional war memori- als, focused on soldiers as representatives of the nation-state. Similarly, in just looking, in taking crayon-rubbings of the engraved name of a friend or relative, or in leaving offerings—candles, flags, flowers, personal letters—viewers are able to mourn and remember in a way that is at once shared and highly individuated. In this respect, both the monument and expressive-aesthetic responses it arouses are an outstanding instance of the “institutionalized individualism” that Parsons regarded as one of the most progressive and most characteristic features of modern American society.22 Many of the debates over art and high culture that form such a large part of the journalistic discussion of the arts might obviously be seen in terms of the tensions or fragilities in the insti- tutionalization of high culture and an autonomous or differentiated art world. Sociologists have been quite sensitive to these pressures toward dedifferentiation, largely because they seem to confirm that the most important issues in the art world are “really” social, rather than “aesthetic” (Dubin 1992). This is of course a classic instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, since social interactions are conditioned by expressive-aesthetic considerations as much as vice versa. Certain aspects of postmodernist thought and analysis might be seen as the counterpart inflated aesthetic orientation, with roots in certain radical avant-garde movements, and giving primacy to aesthetic experience and expressive-authenticity at the expense of moral or cognitive claims of truth and validity (Featherstone 1989, 149).23 Part of the problem is that sociologists of art have accepted the categories of “art” and “aesthetics” in a concrete way while simultaneously try- ing to deconstruct them, rather than reformulating the categories in a more analytical way. Para- doxically, they thus reinforce and perhaps exaggerate the boundedness of art from society that 270 After Parsons to the social, he reminds us, was of equally long-standing interest to him, extending back to his participation in a famous Harvard faculty seminar led by the physiologist Lawrence J. Henderson, a figure he repeatedly cited in various essays, including the present one.8 Living organisms do not function in a vacuum but in a physical world,9 the other external system in the human condition. As noted earlier, Parsons takes our empirical knowledge to have three systems–the human organic, the action system (the system of social relationships and institutions), and the physical world. These can be known within a positivistic frame of reference. However, this does not ex- haust the subjective experience we have of the world, for there is also a component of the human condition that is the “telic system.” Understand by that what human beings have grasped to lie as real beyond empirical knowledge—the transcendental realm, which of course has cultural variations. The action frame of reference would be developed, refined, and augmented by Parsons in the years and major works that followed. But Parsons ventures an important second “internal” system, the “telic system.” Where does this come from? It arises in part from numerous discussions with Robert Bellah, but Par- sons also makes reference to the Harvard zoologist Ernst Mayr, who introduced the term “teleonymy” for the goal-striving property of organisms. I venture that Parsons used Mayr’s “telic” to legitimate what he also considered a significant component of the human condition that a strictly empiricist standpoint would question, namely the transcendental, to which Kant had accorded a residual status as the “noumenal.” Parsons unequivocally states (1978a, 356) that the telic has “especially to do with religion” and the “reality of the nonempirical world”: “With full recognition of the philosophical difficulties of defining the nature of that reality we wish to af- firm our sharing the age-old belief in its existence.”10 In the second section Parsons outlines a new venture at hand, namely to interrelate the physical, the organic, the telic (or “transempirical”) to the action system. The conceptualization of the telic is the springboard for conceptualizing the human condition; to do this he draws heav- ily on the familiar four-functional-categories framework, AGIL. Parsons’s initial presentation of the general paradigm of the human condition is shown in figure 13.1. Parsons reiterates that the paradigm presents categories of the human condition is terms of their meanings or, rather, the meanings of their referents to human beings. He is attempting the construction of scientific theory of a meaningful whole (1978a, 362). He elaborates the justifi-

FIGURE 13.1 General Paradigm of the Human Condition

Instrumental Consummatory L I

Internal (to Human Telic System Action System Condition)

External Physico-Chemical System Human Organic System

A G

Source: Parsons (1978b, 361). Action Theory and the Human Condition, by Talcott Parsons. Copyright © 1978 by The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. 272 After Parsons

FIGURE 13.2 Structure of the Human Condition as System

Grace

Faith

L Telic System Action System I l ii l

Ultimate Ground (B) Ultimate Order (B) Social System Cultural System for Action Ultimate Agency (B) Ultimate Fulfillment (B) Personality System Behavioral System Grounding of Meaning

a g g a Energy Nature Systems Organic of Nature Ordering of of Biological Motivational Organization Intelligibility

Physico-Chemical System Human Organic System a gg a Oxydation (H) Carbon (H) Complexity (H) Metabolism (H) Energy (W) Phenotypical Ecological Matter as fuel (W) Fire (G) Organism Adaptation Earth (G) (Nitrogen—Wald)

H2O (H)

Living Systems Oxygen (H) Material Basis for Water (H) Regulation (H) Breeding Genetic Inert Matter (W) Information (W) Population Heritage Water (G) Air (G) liil A G Adaptive Capacity B — Robert N. Bellah H — Lawrence J. Henderson Fitness of the Environment W — Norbert Wiener G — Greek Philosophers

Source: Parsons (1978b, 382). Action Theory and the Human Condition, by Talcott Parsons. Copyright © 1978 by The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. to the last “academic” essay Durkheim wrote, on the eve of World War I, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions” (Durkheim 1914/1960). Like Parsons’s essay, Durkheim’s work begins with a look backward at what he had recently written, the controversial Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912/1995). Durkheim chides his critics for missing the key principle on which his analysis rests, namely, the dualism of human nature. It is a universal aspect of human nature that humans have been aware of self as composed of two radically opposed elements, body and soul, the body being an integral part of the material universe, and the soul having an abode elsewhere and having a divine status not enjoyed by the former. Durkheim broadens his reﬂection regarding the validity of this age-old conception of Homo du- plex, which, he says, gives our inner life a “double center of gravity” (1914/1960, 328). It is an as- Parsons and the Human Condition 277

FIGURE 13.3 Three Orders of Reality and Their Respective Forms of Knowledge

Natural Social Order Order

Embodied Knowledge Practical Discursive Knowledge Order Practical Knowledge

Nature

Material Culture Propositional Culture

Natural Relations

Practical Relations

Embodied Discursive Relations Potentialities/Liabilities

Source: Archer (2000, 162).

in socialization, it is not “the gift of society,” but has to be worked out by “an active and reflective agent,” by the active human subject with a personal identity. The discussion of Archer has been given more space than the others, although it has been very cursory for the purpose at hand. I did want to indicate that I see in her approach an important compatibility with “A Paradigm of the Human Condition,” one that needs a separate oc- casion for a fuller treatment. The basis of the compatibility, I would propose, is twofold. First, Parsons and Archer operate from a general voluntaristic perspective of the social actor, an active agent competent to make sense of her situation, to select, act, and interact in a nondetermin- istic way. Essentially, Parsons and Archer subscribe to a view of the world, including the social world, as being “an intrinsically open system” (Archer 2000, 221), one that allows, for example, a creative reflective response to unscripted circumstances. The second basis of compatibility is more subtle. Archer’s discussion of intersubjectivity, of the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived consciousness and the body (Archer 2000, 127), of the basis of human agency is entirely intelligible within a broad philosophical underpinning of the human condition. Parsons in The Structure of Social Action acknowl- edged that phenomenological underpinning. It was less central in the middle of Parsons’s ca- reer, when he gave paramount attention to the analysis of systems, but it reappears very much in his last new intellectual venture, “A Paradigm of the Human Condition.” My conclusion points to a fruitful dialogue between Parsons and Archer.